8/8 This much-needed book challenges reductive narratives and reframes the role of women artists under Catherine the Great. It marks an important step in building a feminist art history of the Russian Empire.

7/8 Equally telling is the near-total absence of Russian-born women artists. Structural barriers kept them from emerging, leaving the spotlight on foreign-born women—much like Catherine herself.

6/8 Her answer is interesting: Catherine II did not consciously promote women artists. She acquired works recommended by male advisors, reinforcing their gendered biases. As a result, her collection of women’s art was incidental, not deliberate.

5/8 Blakesley’s book pushes back. She gives nuanced biographies of women artists commissioned in Russia in the later eighteenth century and asks: what difference did having a female ruler make for women’s careers?

4/8 That oversimplification shows a wider problem: women artists’ work is too often explained through their relationships with men, patrons, mentors, or family, rather than recognised for their own expertise and agency.

3/8 Twenty years ago, at the Russian Museum, I heard the sculptor Marie-Anne Collot reduced to a romantic anecdote: her model of Peter I’s head supposedly had heart-shaped pupils because she was in love with her mentor, Étienne-Maurice Falconet.

2/8 A vital step toward a feminist art history of the Russian Empire, it highlights women’s contributions that remain too often undervalued.

1/8 Excited to share my review of Rosalind Blakesley’s "Women Artists in the Reign of Catherine the Great" in the latest issue of Slavonic & East European Review. Link - muse.jhu.edu/pub/427/arti...

Thank you for your interest! My collaborator Dr Emma Gleadhill will present the results of our project next year at the Johnston collection in Melbourne.

My copy of "Napoleonic Objects and Their Afterlives" has arrived! My chapter with Emma Gleadhill follows the Napoleonic collection Dame Mabel Brookes assembled in the early 20th century, now quietly housed in the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.

Call for Papers - Voltaire in the Baltic World: Circulations, Receptions, Legacies 5-6 March 2026, University of Tartu, Estonia In connection with an upcoming exhibition on Voltaire at the University of Tartu’s Museum of Art, and in collaboration with the Voltaire Foundation…

Call for Papers – Voltaire in the Baltic World: Circulations, Receptions, Legacies

Our colleague Sophie Turner is organising this exciting conference in Tarttu, Estonia, next year, which the Voltaire Foundation is supporting.

www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/news-item/ca...

8/ This pot was named the “Devonshire Garden Pot” in honour of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
Stylish, influential, and politically engaged, she was also great for marketing.

7/ The anti-slavery medallions were among the most powerful objects on display.
Produced in the late 18th century, they were distributed freely and worn as pins or hairpieces.
“Am I not a man and a brother?” Early abolitionist design at its most effective.

6/ A fun moment of design recycling:
One plaque celebrates the First Fleet's arrival in Australia.
Just two years later, the same visual was reused to commemorate the French Revolution.
Same layout — very different message!

5/ This neoclassical pot was designed by Lady Elizabeth Templetown, one of several aristocratic women who collaborated with Wedgwood.
Her designs celebrate domestic virtue: sewing, spinning, and graceful calm.

4/ Every item in the set features a frog, at Catherine’s request.
The palace was to be built on land called “Kekerekeksinen,” or “Frog Marsh” in Finnish.
She loved the name so much that she embraced the frog as a motif.

3/ These two plates from the Green Frog Service really got me.
Catherine the Great had 952 pieces made, with over 1200 British landscape scenes.
I study her, so seeing them in person felt emotional, like bumping into an old friend in an unexpected place.

2/ This pineapple-shaped tea canister (1760s) was a delight!
In the 18th century, pineapples were so rare and prestigious that people rented them as dinner table centrepieces.
Naturally, Wedgwood turned the trend into high-end ceramic design.

1/ While in Townsville for a conference, I was excited to discover the Wedgwood exhibition I’d quietly been hoping to see, and yes, I slipped away to visit.
Here are a few highlights from a truly wonderful experience.

7/ Our paper asks what is at stake when one species is quietly replaced with another in the service of a more comfortable story?

6/
We explore the possibility that this substitution was not accidental. The acacia, with its bright blooms and colonial associations, complicated the narrative. The willow, in contrast, restored a more recognisable, and politically safer, imperial memory.

5/
A storm destroyed most of these acacias just before his death. What remained in the historical record, however, was not the antipodean tree but the European willow, more aligned with Romantic tropes of grief and loss.

4/
Contemporary sources indicate that Napoleon originally selected a burial site under “Botany Bay willows”—a colonial-era term for Acacia longifolia, or Sydney Golden Wattle.

3/
The prevailing tradition associates Napoleon’s grave with the weeping willow (Salix babylonica), a European symbol of mourning. But our research revisits an earlier, largely forgotten detail.

2/ Our paper explores how a set of trees, said to be descended from those near Napoleon’s grave on St Helena, took root in Australia, where they became part of settler commemorative landscapes.

1/ This Wednesday at 9am at the AHA in Townsville, I’ll be presenting a collaborative paper with
Dr Emma Gleadhill on the history of Napoleonic willows in Australia. It’s a story about memory, misidentification, and botanical imperialism.

A lovely surprise: my book "Women, Green Spaces and the Politics of Empowerment in Imperial Russia.
Empress Maria Feodorovna's Pavlovsk Park" is now listed in the publisher's online catalogue! www.bloomsbury.com/au/women-gre...

3/3 Brookes saw herself as a custodian of shared Anglo-French heritage and a Cold War moral voice.
Her collection wasn’t just nostalgic: it asserted a woman’s right to shape national memory from the domestic sphere.

2/3 After Brookes’s death, the NGV struggled to house her collection. Seen as historical rather than “high art,” it clashed with curatorial priorities. Her vision of a feminine, family-centred imperial legacy was sidelined, most of it never shown.

1/3 In 1975, Dame Mabel Brookes left the National Gallery of Victoria 380+ Napoleonic items — objects, letters, furniture, prints.
She built the collection to link her family to Napoleon on St Helena and inscribe them into world history.